Walking Through Shadows (18 page)

I can’t stay in this house; I can’t. Her ghost is here. At night, I hear her calling me, “Stoney, Stoney, Stoney.” Then she starts crying. I listen to her sobbing, and it near breaks my heart. Sometimes it’s that baby wailing all night. Its cries are real weak, like it’s far away, but I hear it all the same. Mostly, though, it’s Sheila I hear, and I cover my head with a pillow, but her voice goes right through the feathers into my head. Last night I got up and I yelled at her. “Hush up now! Leave me be!” But she ain’t gonna quit till I get her in the ground. I know that.

I ain’t gonna be in this house much longer no how. I know that too. My life is over and I never got to see the ocean or California or any place excepting Louisiana, and that wasn’t much.

When the sheriff come out here this morning, I told him that it ain’t right that a man can’t bury his wife. That’s the worst of it. Not burying her. Her lying in that dark basement without nobody who loves her. If I could get her in the ground, she’d stop calling me every night. But that sheriff ain’t got no heart; he ain’t got no wife, and he don’t know how it is. He said he can’t release her body yet, and I just got to wait. Sheila’s papa ain’t getting her. “You ain’t touching my Sheila” is what I yelled at that bastard yesterday down at the morgue, and when he grabbed for her, my fist come up against his head. I seen blood dripping off his face, and I knowed I could take him then. I would’ve too except he run off.

The sheriff wouldn’t say no more about Sheila’s body, said that wasn’t what he’d come to talk about. He kept pulling out his handkerchief and wiping the sweat off’n his face. Me and Sheila ain’t got no fan, and I reckon he wasn’t used to the heat. I didn’t offer him no water though; I wanted him to get the hell outta my house. But he kept on asking questions about Sheila and me. I tried to answer ever’thing he asked, but then he got to tapping his pen on the table and it kept on and on until I got to feeling like thunder was going through my ears and into my head and booming out the other side, and I wanted to put my hands over my ears. He said something else I don’t remember, but finally I heard him say he guessed that was all for now, and he drove off in his sheriff car.

Then less than an hour after he left, I looked out the front door and seen Effie Carruth standing on my porch. She was polite, asking if’n she could come in and talk to me about something important. Behind her I seen a Ford automobile I didn’t recognize filled up with children and a lady sitting behind the wheel wearing a man’s straw hat. Sheila’s mama don’t know how to drive, and I guessed it were some neighbor lady or church friend of hers giving her a lift over to here.

I let her come on in, and she looked around real interested in what-all she seen. She hadn’t never been over before. Sheila’s papa forbid it, said he’d never set foot in Stoney Barnes’ house. She was clutching a big purse to her bosom like it was her baby, and she eased down on the couch real slow like a person with aches and pains. She crossed her feet that was laced up tight in black men’s shoes and swallowed hard a couple of times. Finally, she got to it. “Stoney, Mr. Carruth told me what happened down to the hospital.”

That got my jaw tight. I didn’t answer her and stayed on my feet in front of the spare chair.

“He said the sheriff’s gonna decide on what happens to Sheila.” When she said that her voice caught in her throat and she pressed her lips together for a minute before she went on. “I’m headed to town right now to talk to him, and here’s what I want to say. There don’t have to be no wake at nobody’s house. We could just go right to the funeral and burying. The church is the proper place for her now. I can get us a box for her and, if you’ll say yes to it, I’ll see to it that she gets laid out proper and buried in the Bethel Baptist cemetery out at Mars Hill.” Her knuckles was white on her purse, and I seen how hurt her gray eyes was. Maybe Sheila had been calling her mama at night too is what I thought.

I sat down and dropped my head in my hands. I tried to figure what Sheila would want me to say to this, and I seen her little face all lit up talking about them little young’ns she growed up with. Her mama was a good woman too. I knowed that none of her husband’s doings was her fault. I raised up. “I’ll say yes to it. You tell the sheriff, if he’ll let you have her, I said yes to it.”

Sheila’s mama loosened up on her purse and stood up. “I’ll go then. I’ll see to it and let you know when to come to the church.”

I felt just about as sad as I ever have thinking on walking into the church where Jesus’ face would be looking down on her box. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve. “You let me know. I got to be there when she goes in the ground.”

Annette

A storm swept across Lexie County on the September night before Sheila’s funeral. That Sunday morning we sat at the breakfast table eating our eggs and ham slices and biscuits in slow motion. Daddy had bags as big as small lemons beneath his red eyes, and Mama’s face was swollen and sore-looking. “I say let’s skip church this morning,” Daddy said. “We got the funeral to get through this afternoon.” He had just returned from the milk run, and an orange stain ran down his pants in the shape of an exclamation point. I guessed he had broken another bottle of juice.

“Fine with me,” I said. I hadn’t learned my verse for Sunday school.

“Me too,” Mama said. “I guess I should call Mother to let her know; she’ll be worried if we don’t show up.” But she didn’t get up; she propped her elbows on either side of her plate and gazed off toward the stove.

“What time is the funeral?” I asked, looking first at Mama and then at Daddy, who was staring at the ceiling.

“Three,” he said. “Maybe it’ll dry up some by then. Nothing worse than a burial in a water grave.”

Mama came back to us and said in a child’s voice, “I don’t think I’ve ever been to a funeral when there was no wake before.”

Daddy pushed his chair back. “Circumstances are different. Autopsy and hard feelings between the Carruths and Stoney.”

That afternoon I sat looking out the window of Mama’s Dodge as we drove out toward Bethel Baptist at Mars Hill. While the skies had cleared early in the morning, a dark covering of angry clouds had begun to hover over us. The past month had been dry, and the farmers were glad of the afternoon storms that had visited us in the last week. In a way, I was glad of them too. I imagined a funnel cloud lifting our cows, swirling them in the sky like pinwheels. I saw the corn, torn from the soil, dancing around the cows, and Sheila and I riding a stalk, suddenly finding ourselves on a golden road leading to the castle of Oz. I could wake up from that dream, happy again because these last days were only a nightmare, and like Dorothy I would run into Sheila’s house calling her name. She would be there just like Auntie Em, smiling, her arms open to catch me and hold me to her.

The coffin was closed, and I was glad for that. I didn’t want to remember my Best Friend in this ugly square room. She belonged out in the pasture, in the fig tree, somewhere where the wind could blow through her hair and she could smell the buttercups that grew wild over our land. As I sat in the pew looking around the church, I couldn’t help comparing this funeral to Aunt Doris’s. There were only thirty or so people scattered around the room. Sheila’s mother and all of the Carruth children sat on the first two pews on the right. Sheila’s papa stayed away, and Grandma said Mrs. Carruth told her he’d gone off somewhere, but she didn’t know where. We all saw the swelling on her bottom lip and knew that he must have done that before he left. Across from the Carruths Stoney sat with his head down, beside his mother. Stoney’s father laid his arm on the back of the pew, patting his wife on her shoulder pads which stuck up like little bobbed-off wings. None of Stoney’s brothers came. Hugh’s wife, Earlene, sat on the other end of the pew, sniffing into her lace-edged handkerchief. She told Grandma that Hugh had gone to Jackson with the two other brothers, Pete and Daniel.

Although I had attended only one other funeral, I knew that this one was most unusual. There was no cloying scent of flowers, no sad music, no appropriate verses from the Bible the minister held up like a torch. The blanket of flowers on the closed pine box looked cheap and scraggly. A few of the white carnations were brown-edged, giving me the thought that perhaps they had been taken from a corpse already laid to rest.

Except for the toddlers and baby, all the Carruth children carried the box. It looked light and unsteady in their hands as they crept down the aisle after the blistering sermon about sin and damnation was over. By the time we all walked to the cemetery, where a red clay mound awaited Sheila’s body, it had begun to rain and black umbrellas popped open in all directions. Mama looked up at the sky as Daddy ran to the car to get our own umbrella and said, “Oh no. The grave is going to fill up with water.”

She was right. By the end of the last prayer, dust to dust really meant mud to mud. Poor Mrs. Carruth slipped on the red slick clay and skidded several feet before someone caught her by the arm and lifted her up. I heard her sobbing, and then I looked back at the grave and saw Stoney kneeling there in the mud with his hands held up like he was catching the rain for a keepsake of the day.

There was no post-funeral feast, but Mama had brought a cake for the Carruths, which Mrs. Carruth, wearing a black dress that was so old it had a purple sheen to it, nodded for one of the older boys to take from her. We had a pie, too, for Stoney, but before we could give it to him, Earlene Barnes walked over to where he stood beneath the lone oak tree in the cemetery. I couldn’t hear what they said, but Stoney’s head was bowed, and when her hand reached out to touch his shoulder, he threw it off, ran to his truck and drove away. I hollered to Daddy to flag him down, but Mama shushed me. “But he didn’t get his pie,” I said, and immediately burst into tears. Mama knew it wasn’t the pie that made me cry, but she pulled me close and promised we would drop it by his house on the way home.

I had what I hoped was a brilliant idea for a slant to the Barnes’ murder story that would keep my byline on the front page of The Journal. Actually, I have to give Mother credit for it. On the Sunday night after the Barnes girl was finally buried, we were having our nightly tea in the sitting room adjacent to her bedroom. Mother was reading Willa Cather, frowning over her spectacles, and I had taken out a volume of the collected poems of Byron, Keats, and Shelly. Although I knew it by heart, I was just finishing “To Sleep,” and I closed the book and said the last lines, “Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards, And seal the hushed casket of my soul.”

Mother looked up and said, “I suppose they laid the Barnes girl in a pine box today, poor as they all are.”

“Yes, Mother. It was pitiful, really. The family didn’t have the money for a decent coffin. And there wasn’t the usual feasting and visiting after the burial. Everyone left before I had an opportunity to offer my condolences. I found it interesting, too, that Mr. Carruth, the father, didn’t come to the funeral. I heard his wife tell an older lady, a friend of hers, I guess, that she didn’t know where he’d gone off to. And I noticed that she spoke with a swollen lip.”

Mother pulled the lapels of her rose dressing gown tight around her neck. “How terrible! Oh, Leland, I wish I could stop thinking about those two women.”

“What women?”

“The two mothers. Mrs. Carruth and Mrs. Barnes, especially Mrs. Barnes.”

“Why is that, Mother?”

“My dear, you might well imagine that, if you should marry some day, someone much different from the Barnes girl, of course, and your wife should be killed, well, think how I would feel.”

“Tragic no doubt,” I said, but I couldn’t truly visualize such an occurrence in our lives. I had yet to meet someone I felt strongly enough about to want to marry, let alone someone Mother would approve of. Once, when I was ten, just weeks before my father died of a virulent flu, I had brought home a little girl, Charlene was her name, for tea, and Mother had found her mannerisms deplorable, her nails ragged, her hem uneven, her tangle of dark wild hair heathenish. I had taken a second look then, and I saw what Mother did. Charlene was not invited back. Then when I was attending university up in Oxford, I had met a young lady whose sensibilities seemed more in keeping with ours, but she had an annoying habit of saying “I do declare” over and over, which Mother said would surely drive us into the madhouse in no time. Since then, I have settled into a routine that is most comfortable and pleasurable, and I have decided that, when the right woman comes along, Mother will probably know it before I do. Until then, I couldn’t imagine her empathy with Stoney Barnes’ mother.

Mother closed her book and removed her glasses. “Leland, of course you can’t understand, you’ll never bear a child, but if you could, you would sympathize with the boy’s mother.”

This conversation was the genesis of my idea to do a piece on the two mothers, and the next morning, I drove out to the Barnes’ farm to interview Mrs. Jane Barnes. Mrs. Barnes welcomed me into her front parlor and served coffee with plain milk and sugar cookies, which were a bit dry, but I complimented her on them anyway. I think she imagined I was bringing a photographer because she was wearing a two-piece dress with lace collar and cuffs, which I’m sure was reserved for special occasions. Her hair was tightly curled around her lightly powdered face, and although she wore no lip color, her lips were shiny with a Vaseline coating. She was of a nervous disposition, fluttering hands, tapping foot, fussing with strands of her hair that escaped a fake jewel hair clasp.

After twenty minutes or so of a nasal recitation of the history of her family, I was ruing my decision to do the piece, and then Mrs. Barnes led me toward a startling discovery. She had risen from her rocker and brought two photographs from the mantel above the fireplace to show me. “These are Hugh and Earlene’s two boys,” she said.

I took the wooden frames and said in what I hoped was a sincere voice, “They’re handsome lads.” One of them was. He resembled Stoney Barnes quite a bit. Dark hair, square face, heavy brows that arched over beautiful eyes. The other boy, the youngest, had a jutting jaw, bucked teeth, and oddly shaped ears which I finally determined were upside down, the fleshy lobe sitting high on the boy’s head.

Mrs. Barnes took the photographs back and looked at them again with a maternal smile. She sighed. “It’s such a shame Stoney and Sheila couldn’t have any children.”

I sucked in some air. I certainly had no intention of telling her that her grandchild had been murdered along with her daughter-in-law. I didn’t envy whoever would have to give the autopsy report to the family, and I wondered if Stoney Barnes knew that he would have been a father had his wife not been killed. “It is a shame,” I said. “I’m sure your son wishes he had a child, too. That would help ease the pain of his great loss.”

Mrs. Barnes lined the photographs side by side on the coffee table between us. “Well, he knew that wasn’t a possibility, of course.”

It took a moment for me to recognize the significance of her words. She, the wife, certainly was able to have one, so it was her son Mrs. Barnes meant. I spoke too quickly and loudly. “He couldn’t have children?”

She looked away and clasped her hands in her lap, and I saw that I had offended her. “No. The mumps. No, I don’t think I should…it’s not something…”

“I apologize for my rudeness,” I said. “I’m afraid my question has upset you.” I did feel badly for causing her distress, but I wanted to end this interview quickly and rush over to the sheriff’s office to share this information. I forced myself to ask a few more questions that Mrs. Barnes was eager to answer, and after complimenting her on her refreshments and lovely home, I finally backed out of her drive and drove as fast as I dared on the winding country roads toward Zebulon.

Lloyd

When Clyde Vairo drove up in his patrol car, Annette was washing the supper dishes. Rowena had gone in to lie down, saying her pork chops didn’t agree with her at all, and I was reading The Lexie Journal sitting at the kitchen table Annette had cleared. She had been pouting over the extra chores Rowena had given her, and I had to agree that her mama wasn’t in the best of spirits these days. Truth be told, Rowena had become downright ornery and stubborn as a mule. I tried to joke with Annette a little, told her the miracle baby was causing all our troubles, keeping Rowena up all night, kicking her because he was mad as hell that he wasn’t gonna get out in time for Santa Claus. Annette didn’t laugh though and she snatched the plates off the table and said she wished she could go live with her grandma until the baby was born.

I opened the paper then and ignored her banging the dishes. If she broke something, maybe she’d feel better. I felt like throwing a milk bottle ever’ now and then myself. “Daddy,” she said. “The sheriff’s coming round to the back door.”

I laid the paper down and stood up. “Wonder what he’s wanting this late?” I walked out on the porch and stuck out my hand to him. “Clyde, what brings you out this time of night?”

“Got some questions I need answered,” he said. “How’s the wife?”

“She’s all right, I guess. Sit down. This one’s going hard with her. You want some iced tea, coffee?”

He sat in the far rocker, and I took out my pouch as I sat down beside him. I was pouring the tobacco along the paper when he said what he’d come for. “Lloyd, did you know that the girl, Sheila, was pregnant?”

“Yeah. Well, I knew she told Rowena she thought she was. She hadn’t been to the doctor yet.” I finished rolling my smoke and lit it.

Clyde rocked back and breathed in deep. “Smell of tobacco always makes me want one, but then when I take a toke, it don’t taste like it smells.” He laid his head back on the chair. “Well, the girl was right. Autopsy showed a fetus. So Rowena knew and you knew. Did Stoney know? That’s my big puzzle.”

“I’m not certain on that. Sheila told Rowena she was gonna tell him, but we don’t, neither one of us, know if she got the chance before she died. She was planning on telling him the night she was killed. Rowena was supposed to make a cake the next day, and Sheila was gonna tell Annette and they’d have a little celebration. Of course, it never got to that.”

“Hmmm. So she must’ve told her husband. She was planning on it.”

“I guess.”

Clyde stopped rocking and sat up. “Stoney says he didn’t know.”

“And you think he’s lying?”

“I do.”

“Why would he?”

Clyde stood up. “Oh, he had a good reason for lying. A real good one. I’ll see you, Lloyd. Gotta get going. It’s late, and you dairy farmers get up before the rooster crows.”

I went over Clyde’s words again in my mind. Stoney had a good reason for lying. He’d done it! Sheila had told him about the baby, and he’d gotten mad over it, and killed her. Hadn’t he told me he didn’t want any children? But, if he was the murderer, why would he stick around to get caught? It didn’t make any sense at all. I knew though that Clyde wouldn’t have said what he did without good cause, and I decided that I’d send Stoney out to the field when he came back to work. I didn’t want him close to the house until we knew more.